Lisa’s verbal skills were good, as one expects from a well-read college graduate, and she made a reasonably competent editor. In fact, most of her contributions to the literary field involved editing all of Mother’s “Sword and Sorceress” anthologies. Her writing reminded me of chewing on a battery: a series of weak shocks and a bad taste in one’s mouth. Of course, that could be a result of hearing everything she wrote in her voice, which was annoying beyond belief. It is a different experience to read the writing of people you know. Mother was good, and Father was hilarious. Lisa was neither.
There was a time I did something awful to her, though it was nothing I had planned to do.
Lisa fancied herself a rider, and wanted to come up to the stable on Skyline Ranch with me to ride my bratty horse. I was positive that Lisa would not be able to keep her seat, and would end up in the mud. I was judging by her general physical coordination. If she could not dance, how could she ride? I figured that even if Lisa had had formal riding lessons and was a reasonably capable rider under normal circumstances, my horse would be more of a handful than she might expect. If you recall, my horse was not exactly a rocking chair.
Lisa had been at the dinner table when I discussed innumerable rides, so she could not have been unaware of my horse’s temperament or behavior. It is entirely possible that she had decided that I must have been exaggerating, and thought that maybe she could teach me a thing or two about riding.
Although from time to time I had brought other people to the stable with me, I did not ordinarily permit anyone to ride my horse. This was not out of selfishness, but because I did not want to see anyone get hurt. However, Lisa was in the position of a parent and I did not have the authority to forbid her. We went up to the stable together. I rode Western, with a nice big heavy saddle and a hackamore, so it would be impossible for my horse to fling me about. Lisa insisted on riding English, with an English saddle, her little helmet and jodhpurs and immaculate black boots.
I told Lisa my horse would be completely unmanageable in a snaffle and a cornflake of an English saddle, but she ignored my warnings. As might be imagined, Lisa’s ride was very, very short. My horse took the opportunity to get some exercise, and Lisa went into the mud. It could have been a great deal worse: she was not hurt, merely muddy.
I brought another person to the stable that year: Heather Rose Hearn. I realized my mistake while we were there: I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I realized she was a lot like my mother. Her heart seemed empty and jagged to me, and her basic outlook was cruel. No matter: she took up with my brother nearly immediately, eventually married him, and remained with him for the next several decades. The difficulty she caused him is inestimable. What a pity we so often end up marrying clones of our parents. I have felt at times that introducing the two of them was among the worst things I had ever done.
I have described the first evil in detail: Lisa manipulated my mother and laid the groundwork for her eventual theft of an empire, but the second evil dwarfs it. The first is only money, where the second is blood and souls. Lisa feigned ignorance, refusing to stop my father from molesting children no matter how much I pleaded with her.
Here is what she said about my words:
“MR. DOLAN: Have you, since this all came out with Kenny Smith, been made aware of any other allegations of Walter’s molestation of children other than Ken Smith, the young boy down in L.A. Barry—I believe you referenced Sterling, and Glenn?
MR. BURESH: Let me have the question again. (Whereupon, the record was read by the reporter.)
ELISABETH WATERS: Moira was instantly convinced that Walter had molested every child he had ever been near, so to that extent, yes, I have heard other allegations.”
Yes, the fact that my father only molested five other children on that particular list confirms how unreasonable I was.
Chapter 22: My Father’s Imaginary Relationships (1979–80)
I’m your wicked Uncle Ernie
I’m glad you won’t see or hear me
As I fiddle about…
Down with the bedclothes
Up with the nightshirt!
Fiddle about…
—The Who, Tommy
In the next few paragraphs, I am not going to use quotation marks, because if I do, I will run out, just like I am about to run out of facepalms.
Now that my father is free to pursue his own interests, he is pursuing them all over the house, because they can both run faster than he can. Gregg is 13, and Barry is 12. Both boys are hookers, brought to him by his friends in clerical collars.
With my father in charge of Greenwalls, a new crowd started to come around: My father’s friend, Archbishop Mikhail Itkin, was friends with two other priests: Reverend Richard Kihlstadius, and Father Jim Dennis. The mission of these purported priests defies belief: While wearing clerical collars, they would pick up young boy hookers in San Francisco, feed them, bring them home with the promise of rescue, and use them for sex. Since what was happening amounted to the prostitutes having fewer johns with more safety and less money, a lot of them went along with it. Which is not to say it was reasonable or decent. It was horrible.
Several of these boy hookers would routinely come over to our house. Infuriatingly, just having a professional sexually available visitor or three was not enough for my father. He wanted to believe that the boys loved him, had a relationship with him, and wanted to have sex with him. Apparently, having to pay for sex made my father feel undesirable, and he hated spending the money. Some of the boys would settle for sandwiches and $20.00 bills, but even that much annoyed my father no end. How could he get a child to be willing to have sex with him without having to pay him every time?
The answer is utterly repulsive.
He was trying to legally adopt a child named Barry Austin, a twelve-year-old Native American boy prostitute. If I begin giving vent to my absolute outrage here, the story will never be told. It does not matter how long a child has been prostituted, he needs a parent, not a pimp or a john! Please understand that if I am relating these facts coldly, it is not because I do not care. I do.
The priests introduced Barry to my father with the idea that my father could adopt him and have sex with him. He was not an innocent child, but as hard-boiled and self-serving as could possibly be imagined. The rumor mill claimed Barry thought he was getting a great deal because my family had money, at least more than his family did. Once more, the fact that Barry’s innocence had been stolen due to his work as a prostitute does not excuse my father’s victimization of him!
Barry’s mother was in favor of the adoption. His father was in prison, and money was tight. She seemed to think that for him to be involved with our family was so financially beneficial that nothing else mattered. I do not know whether she was aware of what my father was trying to do, or not.
My mother’s perspective was clear: As noted in her deposition, she tried to tell my father that if he adopted Barry, he would have to be a son but not a lover. All the testimony about Barry is in the Appendix. One might think that it was kind and compassionate of my mother to try to insist that my father not sleep with Barry, but why would he deserve safety when my father’s other victims did not? What was the real dividing line? Was it that Barry was physically very small and Mother thought he was being coerced? Why was it OK for any child to be a sexual target for my father?
In no way did my father ever intend to obey Mother, or to end his sexual relationship with Barry. Instead, as always, he would tell Mother what she wanted to hear and then come complain to my brother and me about their conversations, even telling us what kind of a story he had cooked up to appease her and shut her up.
I had no question in my mind whatsoever that my father was sleeping with Barry and I was appalled. I could not understand how Mother and Lisa could go along with an “adoption” like this. It was like watching a slow-moving train: the crash is inevitable, and horrible to watch. Why didn’t Lisa stop it? Why didn’t Mother do something? Why was th
is just allowed to go on as though it was the most normal thing in the world? Moreover, why did Mother think for a moment that my father intended to obey her?
Meanwhile, my father’s fame was increasing. He was the keynote speaker for NAMBLA’s second conference in New York in 1979. I am still puzzled that anyone had any doubt about what my father was doing.
Perhaps this is unworthy and horrible of me, but I hated Barry. I hated him because he stole things from me, including the moonstone I had been given at my “puberty ritual” which had taken place shortly before. I hated him because he routinely went through my underwear drawer, which humiliated me. I hated him because he was mercenary, and mostly seemed willing to be around my father to get his money.
I also hated Barry because he insisted on growing pot in my unfinished closet, doing his cultivating when I was away and hoping I would not find out. There were two closets in my room: one for clothing, and one was unfinished and full of dirt and spiders and bare earth, under the front steps of the house. I despised pot and had no respect for those who insisted on living stoned.
I felt torn between despising the carnal beast Barry was and pitying the child who was destroyed so young that prostitution seemed to him a small price to pay to live in my family.
Barry’s “adoption” fell through, likely because he kept stealing from everyone. What I can’t understand is why it didn’t fall through because my father was sleeping with him. Why did my parents finally reject Barry instead of someone jailing my father? Why did the adoption agency suspect nothing? Did everyone just neglect to mention how Barry got there?
Mother and Father went through all the proper channels and filled out all the right forms, and lied their brains out about what was actually going on. I don’t know whether it was more a matter of the agency not looking closely enough to discern sexual abuse or my parents managing to lie convincingly while being “Famous, Important People.”
One night after the adoption effort was over, Barry snuck into the house and I found him there. I called Lisa and Mother over at the Love Nest, and they had him picked up by the police. Tragically, when the police asked him if my father had molested him, he denied it. That meant that later when he tried to report my father for molesting him, he was not believed.
Not every boy in our home was there for my father. Sterling was around a lot: he and I were very good friends. He was 16 to my 13, and I hero-worshiped him. He was tall, blonde, and muscular, and we spent a lot of time together at the Faire as well as at my house whenever he was there and could duck my father.
Sterling was safe. He respected me too much to paw me or make passes at me until we actually decided to date when I was almost fifteen. While we were still just friends, we would spend nights at Faire hanging out together, listening to Journey and talking about everything and nothing. Sterling had a motorcycle when he was a little older, and rode us both up to Sonoma County on it. It was a wonderful ride, and completely exhausting. I had never been on a motorcycle before.
When we got home from the ride, we flopped in a heap on the sofa in the living room. My uncle Don walked in, and began mocking the two of us for our “display of disgusting heterosexuality.” In context, this was absurd: we were sitting together in close contact, but we were not even kissing—nor at that point would we have. Don was simply being a jerk and trying to make a point. I was supposed to understand that in this house, heterosexuality was not normal, and anything I did that was even remotely “heteronormative” would be mocked.
My father tried to induce Sterling to spend more time with him, mostly by offering sexual acts that I refuse to specify, and worse, speculating that I would not offer the same services, as if that were the coin of the realm. Sterling and I were friends, not lovers. I was furious that my father was trying to compete with me for Sterling’s time.
“MR. DOLAN: Okay. Had you ever discussed the topic of Walter and young boys with Marion Zimmer Bradley prior to the placement of Barry within the home in 1981?
ELISABETH WATERS: Yes, in 19—I think it was 1980, I saw a letter that Walter had written to his therapist, Dr. Morin, and he said that he missed Sterling—who was another one of the kids who hung around. He was a friend of Patrick’s—not just because he was horny but because—I forget the rest, but that phrase struck me as so odd that I went and asked Marion about it."
Reading about the reality of my father’s relationship with Sterling in Lisa’s testimony after my father’s death was devastating. How many times do I have to discover that a boy I loved was getting sodomized by my father? And will anyone be surprised that Sterling ate himself into nine hundred pounds of obesity, and died in his forties of heart failure?
It was during this time that my brother Patrick went on a particularly bad acid trip: hardly surprising, but terrifying to watch. He was sitting in the living room, on the folded-out sofa bed, and screaming and yelling about the universe and the moon and the stars, and how he hated women, “fuck ‘em all, fuck ‘em all!”
It is almost certain that my father gave him the acid, as usual, but he might have also had other drugs with it. His girlfriend Heather had a habit of mixing drugs, so any acid trip she gave him the drugs for might also include speed, and mushrooms. He did not ever do well this way, but that never stopped her.
I tried to talk to him, which was useless. Sterling was there with me, and we went for a long walk around Berkeley since there was nothing either of us could do to help. Someone called my uncle Don, who came over, and decided that the way to help Patrick was to get him stoned. After all, if someone is out of their mind on drugs, more drugs will help, right?
Discipline with my father in the house was erratic. My brother and I had never gotten along, and I have already noted my propensity for biting him. I am not trying to excuse my conduct. One day, I bit him, and my father backhanded me across the room. I thought his response was reasonable, even proportional. He had never hit me before that, nor did he do so again.
One day my brother punched me in the nose, no doubt because I said something or several somethings which upset him. He was not an experienced puncher, and he knocked me backwards into the door from the living room to the kitchen. Nevertheless, his punch broke my nose and also knocked me out when my head hit the door. He panicked and called 911.
The ambulance crew came upstairs to check me out. I was fine, but they noticed the lush, verdant six-foot-tall pot plant which grew next to the piano in the music room, easily seen from where I was on the floor. They told my brother that either he would allow them to confiscate it, or they would call the police, who would both confiscate it and charge him with a crime.
My brother spoke ruefully thereafter of how he had seen them admiring their new pot plant on their way back to the ambulance. For some reason, he did not believe they intended to throw it away. Did my father punish my brother for punching me? No, but I think he probably believed my brother had been punished enough with the loss of his precious pot plant.
I suppose one could make a twisted case for the benefits of my father’s homeschooling. After all, Barry and my brother were learning how to cultivate plants and to cope with new and different kinds of challenges, and they were certainly learning a great deal about independence and crisis management.
There was another boy hanging around with my father at this time: Gregg Howell, a prostitute and a junkie. He had also been brought by the priests, but he was my age, 13, and a good deal taller than Barry. His back was criss-crossed with horrible scars from beatings with electrical cords that his mother had given him. He seemed to feel that no matter what my father wanted from him, he was glad to be anywhere he could have food, a bed, a safe place, and no beatings.
Gregg became a fixture in my father’s life for many years, over my serious complaints. I remember hanging out with him when we were still 13, and he made kind of a whiny pass at me, begging me for sex, as though he thought I could save him from my father. I was irritated and refused, and wanted nothing to do with him after tha
t. I did feel sorry for him, though.
Gregg was mixed up with another boy named Nick, who was a few years older than I was. I had a huge crush on Nick. He had a terrific smile, he was tall, dark, and handsome, and he radiated masculinity and presence. I couldn’t think why he would spend any time with my father, because he was mostly friends with Patrick and me. Any time my father caught me hanging around with Nick, he would freak out as though he owned Nick. I imagined Nick mostly stuck around for pot and food, and endured my father’s company in exchange for that. There was much more to it, as I later learned, but I will let Nick tell that story himself.
One day I found Gregg in my father’s bed, and I went to Mother and Lisa and told them. They didn’t seem to give a darn what my father was doing with whom. Instead of calling the cops, Mother and Lisa moved back into Greenwalls, and moved my father into the Love Nest, where he promptly turned it into even more of a bawdy house. Suddenly, there was nobody there to witness him having sex with anyone he wanted to, and nobody, not even me, to complain about his pot smoking. Now my father had all the privacy he needed to do what he had always wanted to do.
It should be noted that in Lisa’s testimony, she remembered my complaint about Barry, but she totally forgot the reason she made my father move into the Love Nest. When I asked her why she didn’t do anything about Gregg being in my father’s bed, she told me, “you never said they were in bed at the same time,” as though that made the slightest difference. If Barry and Gregg had merely been taking an innocent nap in my father’s bed, then why make my father move out of the house?
This is what Lisa said in her testimony, despite her denials of what I had said:
“MR. DOLAN: Elisabeth Waters in her 10-8-89 diary, which was given to the police, indicates the following: Quote, “And I feel like a total idiot for not having said anything back when I thought Walter was molesting [Sterling Orser] ten years ago.”
The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon Page 20
